Killing Children No Big Deal

Ack! I’d forgotten how hard it is to keep up with the news while working for a
living. My contract is over at the end of the
month, but until then I’m having
a hard time finding the time to compose the insightful commentary that
Picket Line readers have learned to love and expect.

I continue to be struck by how people morally evaluate the killing of
innocent people. There’s an implicit heuristic at work that includes the
race or nationality of the perpetrator and victim, whether or not that
person was part of a uniformed and organized military force, how expensive
and high-tech was the equipment used, and whether the perpetrator and
victim might have been able to look each other in the eye. I sometimes wish
that this heuristic could be made explicit, because I think people would
disavow much of it then.

More than 30 Palestinian children were killed in the first two weeks of
Operation Days of Penitence in the Gaza Strip. It’s no wonder that many
people term such wholesale killing of children “terror.” Whereas in the
overall count of all the victims of the intifada the ratio is three
Palestinians killed for every Israeli killed, when it comes to children the
ratio is 5:1. According to B’Tselem, the human rights organization, even
before the current operation in Gaza, 557 Palestinian minors (below the age
of 18) were killed, compared to 110 Israeli minors.

Palestinian human rights groups speak of even higher numbers: 598 Palestinian
children killed (up to age 17), according to the Palestinian Human Rights
Monitoring Group, and 828 killed (up to age 18) according to the Red
Crescent. Take note of the ages, too. According to B’Tselem, whose data are
updated until about a month ago, 42 of the children who have been killed were
10; 20 were seven; and eight were two years old when they died. The youngest
victims are 13 newborn infants who died at checkpoints during birth.

With America choosing the Israeli path of peacemaking by attempting to
conquer, subdue, and humiliate our enemies (a path that, to be fair, they
might well have learned through emulating American policy by playing Cowboys
& Indians), we can start asking those questions too.

While 150% of Israeli children’s deaths had resulted in headline coverage
(some deaths generated multiple stories), only 5% of Palestinian children’s
deaths received similar coverage.

How are all these children being killed by militaries that insist they’re
doing everything they can to avoid civilian casualties? That’s right — it’s
the enemy’s fault:
they’re using children as “human shields”

One miguelbar on MetaFilter pointed to this quote
from the Wall Street Journal to show how human
shields work:

A little over a week later, 34 children were killed by car bombs while
U.S. soldiers
handed out candy at the reopening of a sewage treatment plant in Baghdad.

In 2008, Jesse Beaudin wrote me to dispute the
accuracy of this report and the implications I drew from it. The following
year, Nick Ayers also wrote me with his story. Please see
The Picket Line for
17 March
2008 and for
3 April
2009 for follow-up articles.

After writing about the mini-mutiny of a
U.S. platoon in
Iraq a few days
ago, I found
this analysis
of the state of U.S.
armed forces in the closing years of the Vietnam War. Clearly, we ain’t seen
nothin’ yet, this time around:

“Frag incidents” or just “fragging” is current soldier slang in Vietnam for
the murder or attempted murder of strict, unpopular, or just aggressive
officers and NCOs. With extreme
reluctance (after a young West Pointer from Senator Mike Mansfield’s Montana
was fragged in his sleep) the Pentagon has now disclosed that fraggings in
1970 (109) have more than doubled those of
the previous year (96).

Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in
bivouacs of certain units. In one such division — the morale plagued Americal — fraggings during 1971 have been
authoritatively estimated to be running about one a week.…

Bounties, raised by common subscription in amounts running anywhere from $50
to $1,000, have been widely reported put on the heads of leaders whom the
privates and Sp4s want to rub out.…

As early as mid-1969, however, an entire
company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade
publicly sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, another rifle company,
from the famed 1st Air Cavalry Division, flatly
refused — on CBS-TV — to advance down a dangerous trail.…

“Search and evade” (meaning tacit avoidance of combat by units in the field)
is now virtually a principle of war, vividly expressed by the
GI phrase,
“CYA (cover your ass) and get home!”…

Symbolic anti-war fasts (such as the one at Pleiku where an entire medical
unit, led by its officers, refused Thanksgiving turkey), peace symbols,
“V”-signs not for victory but for peace, booing and cursing of officers and
even of hapless entertainers such as Bob Hope, are unhappily commonplace.…

One militant West Coast Group, Movement for a Democratic Military
(MDM), has specialized in weapons theft
from military bases in California. During 1970,
large armory thefts were successfully perpetrated against Oakland Army Base,
Fts Cronkhite and Ord, and even
the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton, where a team wearing Marine uniforms
got away with nine M-16 rifles and an M-79 grenade launcher.

Operating in the middle West, three soldiers from
Ft Carson,
Colo., home of the Army’s
permissive experimental unit, the 4th Mechanized
Division, were recently indicted by a federal grand jury for dynamiting the
telephone exchange, power plant and water works of another Army installation,
Camp McCoy, Wis., on
26 July 1970.

It’s a fascinating look at a part of American history that is frequently
overlooked both by the Vietnam hawks who think that the military was doing
just fine if only the civilians hadn’t gotten in the way, and the Vietnam
doves, who tend to overemphasize the role of stateside protest and play down
the role of dissention in the ranks. Recommended reading.

It’s difficult to communicate how disgusting and macabre this is. It’s like
questioning the family members of a murder victim in order to figure out
whether the killer deserves a medal. Imagine the reaction of the average
American being questioned on whether a particular Iraqi resistance member
deserves a medal for personally killing some American soldier or whether the
soldier was merely killed in an explosion. And the Iraqi resistance is
fighting in its own country to expel foreign invaders, not occupying and
destroying another country, as the United States did in Vietnam.

It’s very sad that, one one of the rare occasions in which Vietnamese voices
are inserted into the American dialogue about the war, it is done in this
obscene manner.

Find Out More!

For more information on the topic or topics below (organized as “topic →
subtopic →
sub-subtopic”), click on any of the ♦ symbols to see other pages on this site that cover the topic. Or browse the site’s topic index at the “Outline” page.